HP Pours SaaS Sauce Into ALM Firepit

HP has announced new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions designed to speed application delivery across siloed or geographically dispersed application development and operations teams.

A double-barreled release this week sees the arrival of HP Agile Manager into executing and tracking Agile development projects; on the same platter comes HP Performance Anywhere for resolving application performance issues with predictive analytics.

HP Agile Manager is built to "unify and promote" collaboration by providing visibility into tasks, metrics, and progress for a single group or for multiple, geographically distributed teams. This tool bids to simplify planning and capacity management across Agile teams to reduce potential issues or bottlenecks. It also aims to foster collaboration through integrated development environments (IDEs) that allow developers to work with the tool of their choice, but still work together to share information with other team members.

This type of tool aims to sell its sizzle and spark to CIOs via real-time key performance indicator (KPI) metric updates delivered through customizable dashboards. At a deeper developer level there is (arguably) more interest in the two-way synchronization that exists with HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HP Quality Center continuous testing.

While most of these product details appear to be admirable, interesting, and informative, they probably fail to represent completely new ground in the ALM market in general. Of more interest then is the news of HP Performance Anywhere. Included in this batch of announcements, this "360 degree environment" style tool monitors applications across the Web, via the cloud and also in mobile environments. All these products fall under the HP Converged Cloud strategy and they (logically) all integrate with each other so that (as HP puts it) developer teams can promote collaboration across build, test, and operations to align IT with business priorities.

Subbu Iyer, vice president, product and strategy, software at HP says that when combined and considered together, HP Agile Manager and HP Performance Anywhere provide what the "intuitive, collaborative, and analytical" capabilities needed to enable development and operation teams to deliver business-driven results.

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